OSCAR WILDE

1854-1900Irish

"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. "

Oscar Fingal O’Flaherty Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in
1854. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and then at Magdalen College,
Oxford where he started the cult of ‘Aestheticism’, whose basic creed was ‘arts
for art’s sake.’ He was a brilliant scholar and also revealed himself to be a
great wit, entertaining people with his stories which were so fascinating that,
as one observer noted, they could ‘charm toothache away.’

Following his marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, he
published several books of stories, such as The
Happy Prince and The Selfish Giant,
which were ostensibly written for children but in fact contained strong themes
concerned with the ideas of love, sacrifice and religion. His only full length fiction was the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). It is
the story of a gilded youth who wishes
that he can remain as fresh and beautiful as his newly painted portrait. The
wish is granted, and Dorian pursues a libertine life of
varied and amoral experiences, while staying young and radiant; all the while
his portrait ages in a gruesome fashion, marking his face with every sin he
commits.

Wilde’s first success as a playwright was with Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1892. This was
the first of a quartet of brilliant plays which, while having the frivolity of
humour and cleverness and sharpness of wit, satirise in a fierce fashion the
morals of society, exposing the fraudulent emotions and motives that lay
beneath the sophisticated veneer. It seemed that the audiences who attended these
plays never fully understood that they were in their elegant and witty fashion
mocking them and their pretences.

He followed this play with A Woman of No Importance, An
Ideal Husband and The Importance of
Being Earnest, which is considered Wilde’s masterpiece. All these plays
were performed on the London stage between 1892 and 1895.

These productions brought Wilde great success and he
became the toast of the town and a larger than life public figure who enjoyed
the excesses of his celebrity. However his homosexual activities and his
relationship with his lover Lord Alfred Douglas were exposed by the young man’s
father the Marquis of Queensberry, the creator of the famous boxing rules. Wilde's professional success was mirrored by an
escalation in his feud with Queensberry who had planned to insult Wilde
publicly by throwing a bouquet of rotting vegetables on to the stage during a
performance of The Importance of Being
Earnest. However; Wilde was tipped off and he had Queensberry barred from
entering the theatre.

Nevertheless Queensbury accused
the playwright publically of being a ‘somdomite’ (sic). Rashly, Wilde brought a
libel suit against Queensberry, but lost the court case. He was immediately put
on trial for gross indecency. He was found guilty and sentenced to two years
penal servitude in Reading Gaol. The cruelty of this sentence grows more
intense with the passing years. Today, in the twenty-first century, the
Establishment would barely raise an eyebrow at Wilde’s sexuality; but back in
the Victorian era, it destroyed the man. In a stroke he went from being the
darling of the chattering classes to being regarded as the lowest of social
pariahs. He was now an outcast of society; even Douglas turned his back on him.
While incarcerated he wrote some of his most moving work, including The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis.

The two years in prison broke Wilde mentally and physically
and when he was released in 1897 he fled to France where he lived in genteel
poverty. Soon Wilde was sufficiently
confined to his hotel for him to joke, on one of his final trips outside, ‘My wallpaper and I are
fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.’

Oscar Wilde died of meningitis in 1900. He is buried in Père Lachaise
Cemetery in Paris and his
tomb is one of the most visited there. It is a mecca for all those who revere
the man who could with brilliance and wit create beauty, humour and moral
resonances that still have universal relevance today.